Maximum Lawyer

Tyson Mutrux 00:00:02 This is maximum lawyer with your host, Tyson Matrix.

Tyson Mutrux 00:00:12 So, Jessica, you work really closely with law firms on profit first implementation. And can you explain to to people that have not read the book, they don't know what it is, just in plain terms, what profit first is, and why do you think it might resonate with law firm owners?

Jessica Gonifas 00:00:29 So I think there's really two pieces to it. The first piece is if you feel like your law firm could be more profitable, then this system is really going to help you structure your firm in a way that focuses on profit. So one thing I love about the system is there the typical accounting formula when we look at our PNL is sales minus expenses equals profit. Right. Well profit first flips that and says sales minus profit equals expenses. So it really forces us as business owners to make profit a priority. So if you're in the camp where you feel like, oh, my firm just is not as profitable as it could be. This system, in conjunction with our CFO services, is really going to focus right in on that profit side.

Jessica Gonifas 00:01:25 Like, we are here to run profitable businesses, to give us the life that we want to live financially, right. So. So what I love the first piece about Profit First. The second piece is cash management. So we as business owners have so many decisions to make every single day. And decision fatigue is a real thing for small business owners and entrepreneurs. And I love the profit for system, for the method of allocating your cash and you work together with us? We develop the formulas and it's just a formula. When the money comes into your bank account, it gets allocated out to whatever areas that you have decided are priorities. And then you look at it once a quarter so you don't have to make a decision. It's one less decision you have to make in your day to day business life about where this money's going and what am I going to do with this money? So I think there's two main things that the profit first system really helps small business and our law firm clients with.

Tyson Mutrux 00:02:32 All right.

Tyson Mutrux 00:02:32 So whenever I first heard the whole thing about profit first, it was before I read the book. I had a lot of skepticism and I was like, it doesn't work that way. That doesn't make any sense. Can you? For the for the skeptics out there, like what I guess. What would you say to them? Because it does. It's like you can't just put profit first. You can't just say it and it happens. So I guess, what would you say to those people?

Jessica Gonifas 00:02:54 I think it's like anything that, you know, any new thing we hear about in our firms, right? So most of us as business owners are constant learners and we're looking for better ways to do things. And I think that just saying profit first is going to solve all my problems. That is not going to solve all your problems, right. You have to change behaviors and you have to be strategic, and you have to be willing to look at things in a new way. So I would never tell you, just go implement profit first and it's going to solve your problems.

Jessica Gonifas 00:03:31 We have found it really has to dovetail into more strategic financial planning and budgeting and, you know, just managing the whole the whole financial system, it fits really well into that. And we can customize it to work well with the clients based on what their situation is. I have clients that are very profitable using profit first because they want to have More strategy over where the cash goes. And they've been very successful with that. And we have clients that are probably not as profitable as they like. And we are using this system to help them become more profitable as well.

Tyson Mutrux 00:04:13 Gotcha. So people have to walk before they run. And I want to walk before I run, before I ask the questions about strategy, because I do want to ask you about strategy because I had a we had a mastermind call with our mastermind level members yesterday, and I was talking to one of our members, Jeremy, and he was talking about just strategic cash management and everything. And so I think that's a that's a really important thing that is often overlooked by firms.

Tyson Mutrux 00:04:36 And it's I think it's a way of really accelerating the firm. But before we get to that, though, the the reality is, is that most lawyers have not been taught about how to manage money, either in their childhoods or in undergrad and definitely not in law school. So how would you say that that profit first helps shift the way law firm owners think about money in general.

Jessica Gonifas 00:04:59 I think it makes law firm owners spend more time and get more focused. Right. So what are your goals with your cash? Let's say you have a very profitable firm and you just don't know where the money goes. What are the goals? And we work through the goals. And it sort of forces that whole conversation that you're probably not going to have with yourself. And your office manager isn't going to have it with you, and maybe your wife is complaining at you because, you know, the firm maybe have cash flow issues or whatever, but it forces that conversation and forces you to think more strategically about goals.

Jessica Gonifas 00:05:39 And how am I going to put the money in the right buckets that help us accomplish our goals?

Tyson Mutrux 00:05:44 So you brought in something that's really, I think is is something that's really important for those external forces where maybe a spouse to me, the one, the one I see the most often is people are Draining their firm bank accounts, and they're just paying themselves a lot of money. But to fix the problem, they have to stop doing that. And so their their spouse is like, well, where's all of our money? Well, it's in the firm because I'm trying to fix this. So how? I mean, it's got to be frustrating to you because you that's not a problem you can solve. Is it or is it? I mean, how do you deal with that situation?

Jessica Gonifas 00:06:21 Well, you know, nothing is black or white, which I know. It probably sounds weird to hear an accountant say that, but nothing's black or white, and I'm always looking for incremental improvement. Right. So I get it.

Jessica Gonifas 00:06:36 Your spouse and your family is used to living at a certain level. So how can we start moving you towards those goals without cutting off your personal lifestyle and keeping more money in the firm? So it's always, how are we moving towards the goals? And as with most things, when you make quick changes. There can be a lot of collateral damage. So, you know, we really talk about what's a plan? What's an implementation plan when we have profit first we usually recommend you start really small and maybe you're allocating a tiny amount towards profit. Let's get all of your taxes taken care of. And we're going to have a plan to implement it. And over each quarter we're going to start ratcheting that up. And part of it too is a lot of business owners don't really understand how the cash is moving in their business. And so we usually spend the first quarter just kind of watching the cash. We're going to do a little bit of allocations, but we're watching it to see how it's moving.

Jessica Gonifas 00:07:42 And then we can really start pushing that plan.

Tyson Mutrux 00:07:45 So for the people that don't know what profit first is, it's it's really about, I'll call it moving money into different buckets based on how they're allocated in whenever you're dealing. I'm very curious about this. Whenever you're dealing with a law firm owner, are you? Are you the one that's moving the money? Or is your role more advisory where you're saying this is how you should be doing it? And then the law firm owner moves the money around? How does that work?

Jessica Gonifas 00:08:08 So the law firm owner moves the money themselves. I don't and I don't want access to anybody's money. So the law firm owner moves it. We help develop the allocation percentages. And then we report back on how, you know, we wanted X in this account this quarter. And here's how. It's how we ended up. So I really love the analogy of small plates when we're talking about the actual cash management piece of profit first. So if we are and they've done science and experiments on this, but if we are trying to reduce our weight, if we eat off of a smaller plate, we're going to eat less food than if we have a big plate.

Jessica Gonifas 00:08:52 And I think the analogy works really well with profit. First is we're going to have a bunch of different plates of where that cash is going, and we're going to allocate it to all those different plates, and it's going to change our behavior. Right. So if we do have a firm where we feel like our profit is not where we want it to be, then we have an operating account and we only put so much cash in the operating account, and we are not going to spend any more than what's in there, right? So it is a really great behavior management system, and there's just a lot of great things that come out of it. But my role is to help you determine what your goals are financially. We're going to help you create a budget that sets you up to have a profitable firm. And then we're going to help you determine how to allocate that money every time you do your allocations. And then we're going to report back to you on how that went.

Tyson Mutrux 00:09:48 So when you're talking about the smaller plates, am I, am I reading the tea leaves correctly and thinking that to have the smaller plates, that means you probably need to have more accounts.

Tyson Mutrux 00:09:57 Or am I? Am I going too far with that?

Jessica Gonifas 00:09:59 Yeah. So and I honestly, for me this was probably the biggest because I read profit first probably 4 or 5 years ago. And the foundation is you create these separate cash accounts. Right. So it's cash management. We're going to move our cash into separate accounts. And as an accountant I just thought, oh my gosh. So now all of our clients are going instead of two accounts we're going to have 5 or 6. Like this is not really what I want to be doing. But I eventually came around and I actually implemented it in two of my own businesses, and it really was a game changer, especially for one of my small businesses that my son owns together with me. And, you know, he's 17 and he was complaining I was managing the money. And he's like, mom, why is there no money in my account? And I said, well, it's because you're spending it on all these things. So we implement a profit first with him.

Jessica Gonifas 00:11:00 And oh my gosh, he's constantly telling me now how much money is in all of his accounts and what's happening. And then we also implemented in the accounting firm. So and I, I mean there's lots of great reasons. But having the separate accounts knowing, okay, my money's coming into my main income account and I'm going to allocate it out to these four accounts or whatever I have based on my priorities. It just takes one more decision out of our lives. Like just one less thing to think about. We know what we're doing. We know we're moving towards our goals. We can see that money start accumulating, and it feels like there's so much more control over what's happening with our money.

Tyson Mutrux 00:11:44 Yeah, I, I totally agree. All right. So you mentioned some some more advanced strategies. At least you had hinted at it earlier on. So I am curious like what some of those more advanced strategies are when it comes to tax management, because I think the perception is, is that okay, here's what I owe in taxes.

Tyson Mutrux 00:12:01 I gotta pay that in taxes. And so that's it. You're right. It's just you mentioned kind of black and white. It's just very black and white. To me. It doesn't seem like it's that black and white. There's a lot of gray area that that you can use to your advantage. So can you talk about that gray area and kind of where and maybe you wouldn't call it gray area, but those areas that you can actually, you know, leverage to, to try to, to make more money for you because you, because you're taking advantage of essentially taking advantage of the tax system. So can you talk about that a little bit.

Jessica Gonifas 00:12:30 Yeah. So that that really gets out of sort of the profit first piece. So when we talk about taxes and profit first really what we're our goal there is to accumulate cash to pay our taxes. Right. So that's a big problem for a lot of small business owners is, you know, April comes around and it's like, oh, I have a $80,000 tax bill and I have no money.

Jessica Gonifas 00:12:52 So profit first really Forces that process. So you have the cash. It has nothing to do with tax strategy. The tax strategy side is going to come in more in our tax planning services. And where we really look at all of the opportunities and we develop the tax plan. So we are maximizing the deductions, we're maximizing the entity setup. And we are really working towards keeping as much of that profit that we have worked with you so hard to increase in your pocket. So that comes into kind of a separate set of strategy and planning.

Tyson Mutrux 00:13:35 Gotcha. It sounds like it really comes down to just you're really kind of streamlining things as much as possible. And, and you're you're optimizing every, every single bit, every cent out of the firm is what it really comes down to.

Jessica Gonifas 00:13:49 Yeah. So we're you know, we want to help you become as profitable as possible. Right. And we're going to help you manage that cash so you don't. So, you know, your spouse doesn't say why.

Jessica Gonifas 00:14:02 Why aren't we making more money? You tell me. You have, you know, $500,000 profit this year. But we're living, you know, like we're barely making six figures, and then we're going to maximize the tax savings so you can keep the most amount of that profit in your pocket at the end of the day.

Tyson Mutrux 00:14:22 So for firms that let's say the firms are just kind of starting out with this, they've never done it before. Can you go through like what the core pieces that a firm needs to get into place for, to, to start to implement the profit first system. So let's say that you have a dream client, right. They come to you all ready to go set up with the system. What what does it look like.

Jessica Gonifas 00:14:41 So you have the separate bank account. So if you really want to kind of just basic get started, the very first step is going to be setting up your bank accounts. And you're going to set up five accounts. So your first account is your income account.

Jessica Gonifas 00:14:57 That is basically like your big plate your serving tray. Right. So all of the fees from the firm are going to go into that income account. And then you're going to set up the accounts that you'll use to allocate that money out. So you're going to have a profit account and owners pay a tax account and your operating expenses. So those will be your five accounts. And we usually we would recommend that if you're new to this especially in the beginning start allocating maybe 1% of profit and talk to your tax person about something for taxes. So typically I mean it just varies drastically. But you know, 5 to 10%, even if you're not allocating anything right now, start allocating for profit in taxes and you're going to find out pretty darn quickly how you're operating account how healthy it is. right? So if you're allocating something for taxes and profit and you've not really done that before and you're coming up short in your operating account, you've got to make some cuts, right. So you're going to need to start looking at all of your expenses.

Jessica Gonifas 00:16:09 So that's really what we would recommend for someone that's never done this before. Just get started there. And it's really going to raise your level of awareness to your operating expenses. If you haven't gone through, you know, a budgeting process or anything like that, you're going to see pretty quickly if you're short on cash.

Tyson Mutrux 00:16:27 So how much do you get into with law firm owners like the actual optimization of the actual business? So what I mean by is you seem very inefficient in this stage of the firm because you're I'll just use like a personal injury firm. So let's say you're really good at getting bringing in clients, but for some reason you get stuck in the stage where you've filed a lawsuit, you've done some depositions, but you're not pushing cases to trial. Do you ever get into the weeds with things like that? Because sometimes there might be things that you just that you just can't fix. You know, so I just, I wonder how into the weeds you really get or if it's more of this is how you need to be moving the money around kind of a thing.

Tyson Mutrux 00:17:04 I'm trying to get an idea as to how deep into the weeds you have to get with, because maybe you don't have to. Maybe they maybe just by, you know, monitoring how the cash is moved around, it forces their actions. So I am curious about that part of it.

Jessica Gonifas 00:17:16 So I won't get into the weeds of helping you solve that problem, but we're going to see if that's an issue pretty quickly. Right. So if your cases are taking if you're a P.I. firm and is taking a year and a half for you to settle them, something is not working. So that's where we would recommend you, you know, dig into that business, process yourself or hire somebody to help you with that specifically. You know, we have other clients where they just can't get the cases, the money moved to get the settlement done fast enough, right out of the trust account for the P.I. firms. So the firm owners recognize that pretty quickly, like, oh wow, it's taking us 60 days to move this money.

Jessica Gonifas 00:17:56 After we have an agreement, we need to get more help or fix our processes to move that money faster. So as we're looking at how the money is flowing, the issues operationally usually surface. And that's where the owner then has to step up and say, I'm going to fix this because this is a problem.

Tyson Mutrux 00:18:16 Gotcha. Yeah, I kind of figure this way. It is. And a lot of times the law firm owner knows what the issue is. They just need someone to kind of like push them. You push. Yeah.

Jessica Gonifas 00:18:27 To take care of it. Right. So if we have these goals with our cash and we're not able to move the money the way we want to because there's operational issues, you've got to fix the operational issues, and that's going to fix your cash problem and the goals that you have there.

Tyson Mutrux 00:18:46 I'm very curious. I don't know if I've ever asked you this, but I want to know so badly. are there any parts of profit first that you disagree with? Whether it's the book or the system in general.

Jessica Gonifas 00:18:55 It's not going to solve all your problems with your firm, your business. So if you say, oh, I'm going to create five accounts, everything's going to be fixed for me. It is not going to be fixed for you. I think you still have to budget. You still have to plan, you know, into the future. And most law firms, professional service businesses, most of our expenses are salary, right. So typically just buying less office supplies or, you know, those kind of low hanging fruit is not going to solve problems if you have a cash issue or a profit issue. You really still have to dig way deeper into the operations of the business. You know, in the book, Mike gives an example of he was was one of the businesses he was a part owner in, and I don't remember the exact details, but it was some sort of manufacturing business and the owner wanted to buy some equipment things at Lowe's, and they just decided to delay it for a couple of weeks, and then they figured out they didn't need it.

Jessica Gonifas 00:20:05 Well, that's not always the case. It's not that simple. I know he has to make examples that are going to work for people and resonate. Right. But it's not that simple in a professional services firm. I can't just not pay my people for a couple of weeks because I'm trying to increase my profit. Sure. You know, we can delay some hiring decisions, but that's a very complicated process strategy to go through. Right. Because if we hire people, typically we should then be making more money. So it's just more complex than just some of the simple delaying expenditure examples that he gives in the book.

Tyson Mutrux 00:20:45 What are some of the bigger issues? Is it I mean, is it typically a hiring or. I mean, a lot of times that's the the where people get into trouble because they, they, they kind of hire too fast. But I don't know. Is that is that the biggest problem or is it just like people not monitoring what they're spending money on, like when it comes to like expenditures, like where is like the almost I don't know if I'd call it the low hanging fruit, but where the where the, the where's the area that people could look to first to maybe try to solve it like right away when it comes, if they think that they're maybe spending too much money.

Jessica Gonifas 00:21:17 I think there's two areas payroll and usually advertising and marketing. Those are almost always the biggest expenses as a categories in the firms. So on the payroll side, I don't typically see a lot of over hiring. What I see is there's no data behind the productivity. So they don't really know how much they're billing or if they're flat fee. They haven't developed any methods to determine how productive these employees are. and sure, they're doing some stuff and things are going great. But are they being pushed? And are they doing the right thing. So that's another issue is we just have a new client and she has a she's a small firm, but she's got a few employees now. And the first guy that she hired as a contract is doing everything. He's doing all kinds of admin stuff. He's doing paralegal stuff. And the first thing I said was, he need we need to get that admin stuff off of his plate. You're paying him 35 bucks an hour. He should be doing paralegal billing. If we can get him billing 3 to 4 times his rate, we are going to have a lot of leverage on the revenue side, and you can pay somebody 15 or 20 bucks an hour to do half of what he's doing.

Jessica Gonifas 00:22:38 So as we grow our businesses, you know, we kind of hire somebody because we have a whole we need to fill. A lot of times it's getting stuff off of our plate and we need to really. At least twice a year, step back and say, what are these people doing? And should they be doing that? Or does it make more sense to reallocate some of these duties?

Tyson Mutrux 00:22:57 It's funny. You you bring that up because I want to ask you a little more about this, because a lot of times we get the question of like, it's a true solo, and they want to go straight from true solo to hiring another attorney, right? So they go solo to another attorney and it's like, it's like a big bite of the apple is what they want to do. And a lot of times it does seem like just hire a receptionist or hire an admin staff. So I do wonder if you have any strong opinions as to what the typical next move should be for. And I know that we're having to kind of generalize here, but what do you think that first hire should be if you have if you have any strong opinions on that?

Jessica Gonifas 00:23:35 It's definitely an admin.

Jessica Gonifas 00:23:37 You as a solo as you're scaling, if you can get admin duties off your plate, you're going to be able to build more. And that's going to give you more revenue and more profit to start hiring those more technical positions, right? So the more you can build and the admin stuff get off your plate in the beginning, that's going to give you the leverage that you need to start then hiring those expensive technical people. And you know, that's scary, right? Like $150,000 a year salary in a $300,000 firm or 400,000. I mean, I think you can solo can probably get up to 400, maybe on their own if they're working a bunch. But I am always recommending that we are constantly looking at the range of duties that we're ourselves and our employees are performing, and we need to have a concerted effort to the lowest level duties need to be pushed off to the someone that's qualified to do that. That costs us a lot less money, and that's going to help you scale and remain profitable as you scale.

Jessica Gonifas 00:24:49 Because we also see that problem too is firm scale. They become less and less and less profitable throughout the years, and that profit margin decreases and they don't know why and what's going on.

Tyson Mutrux 00:25:00 I'm curious of you. When you're looking at a firm, do you ever look at numbers like revenue per employee or profit per employee or profit per attorney or profit per? I'm curious what your key metrics you're looking at.

Jessica Gonifas 00:25:12 Yeah, absolutely. And that goes down to that productivity as well. Right. So we are definitely looking at that. And you know, if you were to ask me that two years ago, I probably would have said it has to be 3 to 4 times salary. But again gray areas. Right. So we may have some employees that are 5 or 6 times we may have some that are two times. And we just we have to know what it is and we have to have a plan for it. Right. So maybe we have a senior attorney that's like a managing attorney that has taken we have some law firm owners that don't like management.

Jessica Gonifas 00:25:49 They just don't like managing people. And so they found an attorney that loves it and is great at it. And they're actively doing a lot of that management. Maybe they're only billing two times their salary, but that's totally worth it to the law firm owner. So they don't have to be in the weeds with HR stuff. Sure. So I think it's there's again, it's not black and white, but we're very aware of what are the law firm owner's goals and how do they want to run their firm. And how do they want that to impact their personal life as well?

Tyson Mutrux 00:26:21 Yeah. Are there any other numbers that you can think of that people that firm should track, like. Like for us, one of the big ones is like our average fee or average fee is a big one obviously. And then we look at we look at profit per employee. Revenue per employee. Are there any other sort of key metrics that you think? Not necessarily that you focus on, but maybe that you think law firm owners should focus on?

Jessica Gonifas 00:26:39 I think one of when we talk about advertising costs and advertising expenses, that one is frequently There's not much data behind it usually.

Jessica Gonifas 00:26:49 Right. Like, we we think we're going to spend some money. We're going to try things out. So I would say, you know, you've kind of covered the basics on the operations side, but it's you've got to have the data for the advertising spend. And you know, your conversion rates and you, your sales team and you know, you can find a lot of holes there. And it could be pretty easy to plug those holes if you start tracking the data. So, you know, there's lots of lots of ways on the advertising and marketing side to optimize that spend, which then converts to more revenue.

Tyson Mutrux 00:27:30 So to me, the big one with the with the marketing stuff is, I mean, I'm going to pick on TikTok. It works for some people, but I think for the majority it doesn't. So you're spending X dollars per month to record the and time to record the videos, to then take those videos and paying someone to edit those videos and then paying someone else maybe or the same company to then post those videos.

Tyson Mutrux 00:27:54 And how many cases are you actually getting from those? And like, so you've been doing it for a year and a half. Okay. And I'm all about doing things and being consistent for a while and letting them play out. But there are many people that do this and they've done it regularly, regularly for a long time that are getting zero return or very little return on it. But they're so good, they're so locked in and committed to it that they don't want to admit it's not lead to cases. But and, and I pick on TikTok specifically because for a lot of people it doesn't work. It's just not an effective marketing technique. So are there since I'm picking on TikTok. Are there any any that you want to pick on, any that you think that you're like that's not leading to cases? Stop doing it.

Jessica Gonifas 00:28:33 I mean, not specifically, but I don't disagree with you. We get so emotionally attached to something we're doing that we as business owners. And maybe you like to talk yourself, right? Maybe you think it's cool, but at the end of the day, if the data isn't showing that it's working, you have to cut it off.

Jessica Gonifas 00:28:52 So a lot of the social media is that way, and there are ways to optimize that. So you can post the same videos on 3 or 4 different platforms. So you're getting out there. I mean, we post on TikTok. I have not gotten a single client off of there, but we feel like we have to be on there. But it's reels that we're already creating for Facebook, which actually works for us. So it just takes an extra three minutes to post it on TikTok. So, you know, you can look for ways to optimize that and not totally cut it off without putting so many resources into it. So if you're on TikTok and maybe it's not working, you could then move to Facebook or LinkedIn and put those videos on there as well. And then you're kind of getting you're spreading that reach out a little bit.

Tyson Mutrux 00:29:44 Yeah. To me, the cash cow seem to be linked in in Facebook. Those two are the ones that and not necessarily linked in for us, but for I've seen it for other firms that works really, really well.

Tyson Mutrux 00:29:53 But Facebook has been our cash cow for a long time where, yeah, we consistently get cases on. It's for a social media channel by far by it's it's not even close. The number of cases we get from Facebook versus others, it's because to me, it's the way the algorithm works is it's just more targeted towards your local area. You know, it's it's where your leads are going to come from.

Jessica Gonifas 00:30:18 Yeah. And I think, you know, I know like a patent attorney that uses Facebook, she's been very successful because she gets lots of referrals from either or I'm sorry, TikTok. She gets a lot of referrals from other lawyers and she's nationwide. So that makes sense to me. But what is your target audience? If you're an estate planning attorney and your target, you're in your state, right? So you don't have a national reach, and your target audience is 40 year olds with at least $300,000 a year in combined revenue or income. I'm not on TikTok. I think it's crazy, but my 18 year olds on TikTok all the time, every day, like he looks up how to do things off of TikTok.

Jessica Gonifas 00:31:06 So is your target audience on TikTok and or are they on Facebook now? I'm on Facebook every day. So if I'm your target audience, you need to be on Facebook with me, not on TikTok with my 18 year old.

Tyson Mutrux 00:31:19 Absolutely. Give us a little bit of a peek behind the curtain. so you're you're sitting across from a law firm owner and you're talking strategy. What are some of the financial red flags that you might see that you're like, hey, oh, that you need to address.

Jessica Gonifas 00:31:33 Oh, gosh.

Tyson Mutrux 00:31:34 Too many to list.

Jessica Gonifas 00:31:35 I think it. No, I mean it. You know, I think one of the things there's two things that almost most everyone tells me on our discovery calls. The first one is I'm spending too much on office supplies, and I have no idea what's going on with the advertising. So typically, you know, they're not I don't usually find a huge amount of waste in office supplies. Yeah, there's some things that we can optimize depending on how big your firm is, but typically it's not as extreme as what they think it is.

Jessica Gonifas 00:32:06 Once we look at the actual data and the expenses. So usually, I mean, honestly, it comes down to the people. So most every, you know, most law firms, when they come to us, they're not tracking that productivity. They're not tracking the billable hours. They don't set goals for those hours. And even if they do, they haven't gone to the next step of evaluating, okay, how much revenue is this going to bring in for me and for the firm? And how is that contributing to, you know, the top, top line and then the profit in itself? So it's definitely the payroll and the advertising. Most firms have no idea any how the advertising is serving them. They just keep doing a bunch of stuff and they are making money and they think that's great. But at the end of the day, what is it actually producing for us? So advertising and employees, what are they producing for us?

Tyson Mutrux 00:33:04 I want to make sure I give you the opportunity to talk about this, because I want to make sure people, if they want to work with you, they know how to reach out to you because you're an amazing resource.

Tyson Mutrux 00:33:13 You know, you've got the book keys of the Kingdom, I think is the name of it. And that you are, you're gonna be you're a Maxwell con 2025 sponsor, which is awesome. Thank you for that. So we're bringing back, the Max Lorcan this year, so it's gonna be a lot of fun in Nashville. So if anybody doesn't have their tickets. Max lorcan.com it's we it's it's already close to a sellout. So we need to make sure that, get your tickets now before they're about the price. They're going to go up too. So make sure you get them before the price go up. But but if people want to work with you or they just have questions for you, how do they how do they reach out to you?

Jessica Gonifas 00:33:45 Yeah. So our website, Silver Peak is a huge resource and we are on all the social medias. We're on LinkedIn, Facebook, you know, we're out there, but the website is probably the best because you can actually book a call discovery call with us right there from the website.

Jessica Gonifas 00:34:05 And I do have something exciting. We are going through a rebranding. So and that's a huge, huge process. But we're hoping to have everything launched in August. So we'll have a new website, the name saying the same, but we're really just, you know, it's been six years and we've really elevated services and elevated what we're the value and what we're providing for our clients. So we're excited for the new rebrand and that will be coming out in August.

Tyson Mutrux 00:34:33 That's awesome. Anything you want to tease with that because that's pretty cool. That's pretty neat. Are you doing color changes or what?

Jessica Gonifas 00:34:39 We are so totally new colors, new Logo, and I would encourage you to check out the website because it actually has. So if you don't know, I'm into horses, I show horses Quarter horses at a national level, and our website has a picture of my horse on the front of it, and it's just so it's full circle for us. The reason I started the firm was to have more flexibility to do a lot of this stuff with my kids, and we've built it and it's grown, and we've just been able to help so many folks.

Jessica Gonifas 00:35:15 And having that picture of my horse on there is just, just gives me the chills because it's an amazing, amazing accomplishment for us.

Tyson Mutrux 00:35:23 That's really cool. All right. So let's end with this. So if if our listeners are going to take away one mindset shift from this conversation or one action they should take, but what do you want it to be when it comes to managing money in their law firms?

Jessica Gonifas 00:35:40 I think it would be That having a plan gives you more control and gives you results in less stress. So if you know what you're doing, you have a budget, you have a cash management system in place. You are going to be so much less stressed about the finances and the farm all all together.

Tyson Mutrux 00:36:04 I love it. I think that's a great way of ending. Thank you for joining me for this. I enjoyed the conversation as always. I couldn't believe it had been. It'd been a couple of years since we had talked last. It felt like it seriously felt like we had just like a few months ago, talked.

Tyson Mutrux 00:36:17 I seriously, I was shocked when I looked at it, so I was like been a couple of years, but it's always a pleasure. Thanks for doing this. Thanks for being a sponsor of the conference. Really appreciate it. It helps us put on a better show for everybody. So I really do appreciate it. So thanks for joining me. Hopefully people will reach out to you.

Jessica Gonifas 00:36:31 Yep. Awesome. Thanks, Tyson.